London Book Fair 2016
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
AITKEN ALEXANDER ASSOCIATES EST 1976 LONDON NEW YORK DELHI London Book Fair 2016 The Robbins Office, Inc. For further information on all clients and titles in this catalogue, please contact: SALLY RILEY France, Germany, Holland, Italy, and Scandinavia. Email: [email protected] NISHTA HURRY Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkey and all Indian territories. Email: [email protected] ANNA WATKINS Brazil, China, Greece, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Russia, Spain and all Asian territories and all Arabic territories. Email: [email protected] Literary Agents Centre Tables 18M, 18O, 19M, 19N and 19P Film and Television Rights For information please contact: Lesley Thorne for dramatic rights [email protected] Leah Middleton for factual/documentary and stage rights [email protected] Aitken Alexander Associates Ltd. 291 Gray’s Inn Road London WC1X 8QJ Telephone (020) 7373 8672 www.aitkenalexander.co.uk @AitkenAlexander Cover image: Knopf cover for HIGH DIVE ‘Jonathan Lee’s achingly good new novel’ – The New Yorker FICTION A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker From the bestselling author of LONGBOURN, a haunting new novel of spies and artists, passion and danger, hope in the face of despair. Paris, 1939. The pavement rumbles with the footfall of Nazi soldiers marching along the Champs-Élysées. A young, unknown writer—Samuel Beckett—recently arrived from Ireland to make his mark, smokes one last cigarette with his lover before the city they know is torn apart. Soon, he will put them both in mortal danger by joining the Resistance . Through it all we are witness to the workings of a uniquely brilliant mind struggling to create a language that will express this shattered world. Here is a remarkable story of survival and determination, and a portrait of the extremes of human experience alchemized into one man’s timeless art. UK Publication date: May 2016 UK Doubleday (Jane Lawson) US Knopf (Diana Miller) Canada Knopf (Louise Dennys) Germany Knaus Italy Einaudi House of Dreams by Fanny Blake ‘House of Dreams is a heart-warming tale of family secrets slowly revealed in a beautiful Spanish setting. A compelling and delightful read.’ – Santa Montefiore It’s only a long weekend – what could possibly go wrong? In the hilltop villa with its spectacular views across rolling countryside to the straits of Gibraltar, Lucy anxiously awaits the arrival of her brother and sister. They’re spending the weekend together to say farewell to Casa de Sueños, the house in the mountains of southern Spain where they grew up. Her sister, Jo, landing at the airport with her fractious four-year-old, dreads the prospect of this time with her family, fulfilling their mother’s last instructions that they celebrate her birthday party together – only this time their mother won’t be there. Tom, their brother, is filled with dread, remembering only the chaos of his bohemian upbringing and wanting nothing more than for their stay to go without a hitch. Then a beautiful face from his past appears at the villa... Over one long, hot week weekend, past secrets will spill out, making the siblings question themselves, the choices they’ve made and where their future lies in this gorgeous new novel from Fanny Blake. UK Publication date: November 2015 UK Orion (Kate Mills) Germany Insel Verlag Addlands by Tom Bullough ‘Addlands is a mesmerisingly beautiful novel, a haunting fusion of person, place and history’ - Gerard Woodward ‘Addlands is a gorgeous and painstaking evocation of the land and those who work it. Bullough's writing is a joy - disciplined, observant and musical, blissfully free of cliché’ - Andrew Miller ‘Addlands generously rewards close reading. Its visionary intensity is always thrilling, often moving. Through a succession of brilliant word-paintings a group of interrelated characters evolves over seventy years.’ - Peter Conradi ‘Marrow-deep in its connection to place yet global in its thematic exploration and significance, Addlands does what literature should unstintingly aspire to do: make individual lives the essential stuff of epic. … It's an astonishing work of words’ - Niall Griffiths This is the book we have been waiting for from Tom Bullough, a complete work of art, astonishingly beautiful, deeply moving and gripping from first to last… Zola would have saluted it, and pressed copies on his friends. - Horatio Clare UK Publication date: June 2016 UK Granta (Max Porter) US Random House (Noah Eaker) Monsoon Summer by Julia Gregson “I adored this wonderful story. I loved the characters who leapt from the page and lived in my mind: I wept at the heart break, and my heart lifted at the hope and the joy…I believed every word and from the moment I began reading I truly felt as if I was there. Astonishingly good.” - Dinah Jeffries, author of THE TEA PLANTER’S WIFE By the award-winning author of EAST OF THE SUN, an epic love story moving from England to India, about the forbidden love between a young Indian doctor and an English midwife. Oxfordshire, 1947. Kit Smallwood, hiding a painful secret and exhausted from nursing soldiers during the Second World War, escapes to Wickam Farm where her friend is setting up a charity sending midwives to the Moonstone Home in South India. Then Kit meets Anto, an Indian doctor finishing his medical training at Oxford. But Kit’s light-skinned mother is in fact Anglo-Indian with secrets of her own, and Anto is everything she does not want for her daughter. Despite the threat of estrangement, Kit is excited for the future, hungry for adventure and deeply in love. She and Anto secretly marry and set off for South India - where Kit plans to run the maternity hospital she’s helped from afar. But Kit’s life in India does not turn out as she imagined. Anto’s large, traditional family wanted him to marry an Indian bride and find it hard to accept Kit. Their relationship under immense strain, Kit’s job is also fraught with tension as they both face a newly independent India, where riots have left millions dead and there is deep-rooted suspicion of the English. In a rapidly changing world, Kit’s naiveté is to land her in a frightening and dangerous situation... UK Publication date: June 2016 UK Orion (Kate Mills) US Touchstone (Tara Parsons) Greece Dioptra Germany Blanvalet The Pier Falls and Other Stories by Mark Haddon A seaside pier collapses. An expedition to Mars goes terribly wrong. A thirty stone man is confined to his living room. One woman is abandoned on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. Another woman is saved from drowning. Two boys discover a gun in a shoebox. A group of explorers find a cave of unimaginable size deep in the Amazon jungle. A man shoots a stranger in the chest on Christmas Eve. THE PIER FALLS is a brilliant new collection of stories by bestselling, prize-winning author Mark Haddon. UK & US Publication date: May 2016 UK Jonathan Cape (Dan Franklin) US Doubleday (Bill Thomas) Holland Atlas Contact Italy Einaudi Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan Written in startlingly beautiful prose, HARMLESS LIKE YOU is set across New York, Berlin and Connecticut, following the stories of Yuki Oyama, a teenage Japanese girl who moves to America in the 1960s at the height of pop art, and Yuki’s son Jay who, as an adult in the present day, decides to find the mother who abandoned him when he was only two years old. HARMLESS LIKE YOU is an unforgettable novel about the complexities of identity, adolescent friendships and familial bonds, offering a unique exploration of love, art, loneliness and reconciliation. “HARMLESS LIKE YOU is the story of a mother and her son, but it is too an ode to the outsider, a Japanese-American artist who must also create her own, unprecedented identity in 1960s New York. Moving from Manhattan to Berlin, from the Vietnam War to the new millennium, Buchanan’s debut explores the thin line between attachment and abandonment, love and pain, selfishness and sacrifice. With kaleidoscopic prose and characters all too human, HARMLESS LIKE YOU is an unforgettable debut, as rich in darkness and light as it is in colour.’’ – Chloe Benjamin, author of The Anatomy of Dreams UK Publication date: August 2016 UK Sceptre (Francine Toon) US Norton (Jill Bialosky) Germany BTB Holland Ambo Anthos Celine by Peter Heller From the bestselling author of THE DOG STARS and THE PAINTER, a luminous novel about an elegant, aristocratic private eye who specializes in reuniting families, trying to make amends for a loss in her own past. Celine has made a career of tracking down missing persons. Working out of her apartment, a jewel box at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge filled with paintings, sculptures and even a human skull covered in gold leaf, Celine has a better record than the FBI when it comes to finding people. But when a young woman, Pia, arrives on her doorstep asking for help, a world of mystery and sorrow opens up before her. Pia’s father was a photographer who went missing on the border of Montana and Wyoming. Investigators found blood on a tree and bear tracks, eventually ruling him dead from a grizzly mauling. But the body was never found. As Celine and her partner head west to Yellowstone National Park, investigating a trail gone cold, it becomes clear that somebody doesn’t want them there—that this is a case someone desperately wants to keep closed. Combining the heart-pounding suspense and gorgeous evocation of nature that Peter Heller is beloved for with a wildly engrossing story of family, privilege, and childhood loss, CELINE is the finest work to date from one of our most treasured writers.